


Hair poofs and Braiiiiins!

by limey_limey



Series: It's Halloween, Idiot! [1]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Buried Alive, Character Death, F/F, Magic, Witches, Zombies, all that creepy jaz, beast-men, but cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:41:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27290635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limey_limey/pseuds/limey_limey
Summary: Adora wakes up buried alive..?
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Series: It's Halloween, Idiot! [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1992628
Kudos: 40





	Hair poofs and Braiiiiins!

**Author's Note:**

> This is a twofer - both sections happen simultaneously so once you've read this run on over to Claws and Tails and Teeth, Oh My! to find out what's happened to Catra.

Adora woke in pitch darkness, hungry and disorientated. Was it winter? She couldn’t remember. Maybe she forgot to pull her blankets up when she fell into bed? Rolling onto her side, her mattress felt strangely hard against her shoulder, she pulled herself into a foetal position and felt down by her feet for a blanket that eluded her. 

“Catra,” she called out, voice sounding hollow and eerily muffled, “Come and give me a cuddle, I’m cold.” The other girl didn’t respond. She always responded.

Something was very wrong.

Adora bolted upright; or tried to. Her head slammed into something hard and hollow. She heard the sound, felt the impact but there was no pain. There was a sinking realisation that this was not her bed, or even Rogelio and Kyle’s old bunkbed, before they left. Frantically she reached out her hands and felt around her, either side and above. Wherever she was, it was small, the sides silky and she could touch both at the same time without stretching her arms. She reached up and realised just how close the ceiling was to her face.

Her breath began to come in jagged gasps as she realised that she was in a tiny, dark place with no way out and silk on the sides. She gulped, her mouth feeling funny and foreign to her as something that didn’t quite taste like saliva went down her throat. Was she in a coffin?

Panic filled her and she started to frantically pound at the ceiling, fists punching over and over with an unrelenting beat as her fear propelled her. Her knuckles split, she was sure the sound of flesh hitting wood had morphed into the sound of bone but again she couldn’t feel any pain, she must have just been delirious. It took some time until the wood gave, splintering and exploding into a hole that her fist fit through, she’d always been much stronger than she should have been but even she was surprised that it had been so easy. Not hesitating to think about it, still desperate to escape, she forced both hands through the hole and pulled the wood inward, hearing the crack of wood as it gave.

Dirt rained down on her from the hole, chunks of damp earth splattering into the coffin. Finally she could sit up, pushing her head through into the sodden earth, she may be out of the box but she would have to dig her way out. Using legs made strong from years of playing sports, thigh muscles bunching as she forced her body into the dirt, she pointed her arms and hands like a diver and began to drill upwards, inch by slimy, cloying inch. She was still enveloped in darkness but with certainty born of fear knew that if she continued up she would soon see light.

Adora wasn’t sure how long she had been slithering through the mud, it was certainly longer than the time she had been awake in the box, before she realised that she hadn’t taken a breath. Not one inhale or exhale; at first she had been holding her breath, realising that there would be no air trapped in the mud. She would, essentially, be swimming upwards. She knew she couldn’t hold her breath for that long though, but she was still not breathing. All the exertion wasn’t making her breath heavily, or at all. She could have panicked, probably would have under any other circumstance, but her desire to survive override anything else. She’d worry about everything later, once she was in the air. Maybe it was that super-human strength she’d heard people got when they were facing terrible danger. She vowed to find Catra, she was sure to know.

Then she was breaking through, cool air hitting damp, mud stained hands as she used her upper body strength to pull herself free from the hole, reborn out of the ooz. For some reason she had expected it to be raining, a storm baring down on the girl buried alive, but it was a clear night. The moon was full and giant overhead, stars clearly visible in the cloudless sky and Adora could see again. Looking down at herself she saw that she was wearing her familiar varsity jacket and favourite slacks, mud splattered. She held up a hand in front of her face to exam the knuckles that were, indeed split to the bone. No blood though, and still no pain. Confusion painted itself across her face.

Movement caught her eye as she saw a man with a wheelbarrow walking along a path to her right. She stumbled towards him, legs feeling clumsy, probably from all the exertion. She called out, but her voice was gravelly and didn’t seem to travel as he didn’t react. As her legs got more adjusted to freedom, she sped up and cleared her throat. This time when she called out a loud “Hey, can you help me?” The man’s head shot up. His eyes grew wide as he dropped the handles of the wheel barrow and turned on his heal, pelting away at frantic speed, scrambling as he almost stumbled, a scream bubbling up from his throat as he grew further away. 

Bewilderment crossed Adora’s face, an expression that was common place there. She must have spooked him, after all it wasn’t every day a dirt covered girl came running towards you in a cemetery at night. Just as she was about to follow him, hoping to explain that she was very much alive and scared, her stomach let out a fierce growl, gurgling so intensely that she could feel it (in fact, if she thought about it, it was the first physical sensation she had had since waking up, other than the cold). Covering her quivering middle with her hand she found her feet taking her back to the hole that she had crawled out of. She took a moment to notice that there was no headstone and that the mud she had crawled out of was still piled high, not settled into the hole. She couldn’t have been there very long.

“Hey, Adora!” The voice almost scared her out of her skin and she let out a high pitched squawk, swivelling around and throwing her arms up in front of her defensively. The person perched atop the nearby headstone, feet firmly placed on the top edge and hands grasping in between them, like an animal, released a peel of rusty laughter.

It sounded higher pitched than she remembered, and oddly fast, as though the thing had been sped up like The Chipmunks, but she would still know that laugh anywhere. In fact she knew every sound that came out of that mouth as well as she knew her own voice, even if she had clearly been inhaling helium. Her form was cast in shadows, so Adora couldn’t quite make out her face, but she didn’t need to.

“Catra!” She started to walk over to her as the smaller girl leapt gracefully down from the headstone to meet her half way. 

As the other girl stepped more fully into the moonlight, Adora hesitated seeing the changes to her for the first time. Catra’s hair was longer and wild around her head, giant furry ears twitching from either side of her head where her human ears should be, her skin was covered in thick, soft looking brown fur with stripes across her upper arms. Adora began to step back, arms again defensively in front of her. Catra wore her familiar t-shirt and leggings, but they pulled at the seams across her now bulkier frame. Her feet and hands were bare, each showing appendages ending in wicked black claws and a tail lashed back and forth behind her.

“W…What?” Adora managed to stutter out. Catra’s head tilted to the side as though she was trying hard to hear her even though they were less than six feet apart. The open, friendly, mismatched eyes crinkled as the mouth, now lined with fangs, broke into a smile. “What’s happened to you?”

“What’s happened to me?” Still too high and squeaky, followed by another laugh. “Wow, I always knew this was empty but…” suddenly she was right in front of Adora, she hadn’t even seen the cat-creature move, with a clawed finger pressed to the middle of her forehead. Adora felt her eyes cross to take in the finger as they did every time Catra did this to her. The gesture was so familiar, the touch so soft, that she relaxed, “who knew I was right?”

“Nothing’s happened to me! I’m still me! You’re a…a…Werewolf?” Looking at her this close she wasn’t really sure what she was seeing.

“Hey, if anything I’m a ware-cat, thank you very much!” The answer was glib, but came after a brief pause, as though Catra couldn’t quite understand what she had said. 

The furred face suddenly took on a more serious expression as she took a deep breath, something which Adora knew she still hadn’t done. Maybe there was something wrong with her. Catra stepped back, reaching behind the stone she had perched on, rooting around in what must be a bag from the noise and coming back with a hand-mirror grasped triumphantly. 

“Adora, you’re going to be upset when I explain this but I need you to understand.” Even at the high pitched speed the words carried weight and Adora listened attentively. Catra kept the surface of the mirror pressed to her chest. “Five days ago, Shadow Weaver tried a spell,” their guardian had always been weird, creepy in an unnerving way. There were ouija board in the house and relics of all kinds. Kids at school used to tease the two orphans that they were being raised by a satanist - though it sounded more like Catra was telling her she really had been a witch. 

“I don’t know what she was trying to do, opening a portal to hell by the looks of it! I always told you that bitch was crazy,” Adora winced at the profanity, like always. “Anyway, I don’t know if it worked or went wrong but I woke up and was like this,” she waved her hand to encompass her body, “I felt stronger, faster, all my senses are heightened. It was the best I ever felt. I looked around the house for you but you were gone! I went down to Shadow Weaver’s study and she was sitting in front of this hole that was pulsing with grey light. She didn’t react at all when I went up to her, she was in a trance. Part of me wanted to bite her so much, just rip out her throat and feel her blood pour down my throat,” she saw Adora recoil and pressed on, “but I didn’t. I went up behind her and pushed with all my strength - she went straight into that hole and,” fingers snapped loudly in the quiet cemetery, “it was gone and so was she. Poof, just like they never were.”

She paused here and drew even closer to the blond, reaching up to lay a hand on her cheek and pull her head down so that their foreheads would touch. Although she was scared and horrified by what she had just heard, Adora fell into the comforting gesture. “I thought that would be it, but I was still a furry cat-girl and not the cute Anime kind,” Adora thought her girlfriend still looked really cute, wondered what it would be like to cuddle up to her and kiss her now with the fur and the teeth, “I went out into town, all wrapped up so nobody could see what I was and what I found was pandemonium. There were other creatures like me, but just a few, and Zombies everywhere!”

Catra’s face, so close to her own, clouded with loss and pain. Adora knew what she was about to hear something that had hurt the smaller girl deeply, she didn’t show emotion easily. Adora took the initiative and pressed a kiss to a furry nose in comfort. Catra smiled softly back at her and continued.

“I found you in the mini mart. You were holding a bag of croissants, you must have gone out to get some breakfast for us before I woke up. You were on the floor, surrounded by a pool of blood, there was a chunk out of your side and your white t-shirt was stained. The blood was cold and I knew you’d been gone for a while. I carried you to the house and cleaned you up before I took you to the funeral home, people were running and screaming so nobody noticed. I left you there and tried to figure out what to do without you.” Her expression turned rueful, “then the strangest thing happened.” She noticed Adora’s expression, “Yes even stranger. By the next day it had all stopped. All the monsters were gone, people didn’t seem to believe what happened and there were a lot of burials scheduled for the next few days. I was still like this, though, so I had to hide.”

Adora turned to look at the open grave. Had she died? Catra saw her gaze travel to the ground, and reached down to grasp her hands. “You were bit by a zombie. They just threw everybody into caskets and buried them without ceremony. I’ve been waiting for you for days, people keep rising and I found a few while I was waiting for you. It’s like Shadow Weaver temporarily opened a hell dimension or something and then it ran out of juice but there’s a little bit of residue.”

“I’m a zombie?” It was a lot to take. She’d seen plenty of zombie movies and she wasn’t a mindless, shambling thing desperate for brains. Although, as she thought it her stomach began to growl again. Catra finally handed over the mirror, Adora took it numbly and held it up to look at her face. Her blue eyes were now milky white, her skin pallid and filthy and there was a little bloodless tear along her jaw. 

“Yeah dummy, you’re a zombie. Why did you think that guy ran away?”

“Because I was all dirty and it’s night?” Really, wasn’t it obvious.

“They can’t understand you, to the normal types it sounds like you’re just growling. I’ve been listening to people talk.” She saw the question in Adora’s eyes, “I don’t know why I can understand you - must be a supernatural thing. We’ll have to google it, I’m sure there’s something out there about this stuff.”

“Is that why you sound like you’ve been sped up?” Because, really, it was a little silly.

“Do I? I guess so.” Adora’s stomach let out the loudest growl yet, Catra’s newly cat-like ears twitching at the sound. “We better feed you.”

Adora felt her mouth water at the same time that her chest tightened in horror. 

“Do I have to eat…” she waved her hand around her head.

“I’m afraid so. Zombies need brains, I need flesh.” Soft padded fingers ran to cup her neck so she couldn’t recoil. “You won’t have to hurt anyone, Adora. I have to hunt and eat. We can share, I don’t like the brains anyway.”

Adora laughed wetly, taking Catra by the hand as she pulled her to where her pack was. The Cat scooped up her full back pack and hefted it effortlessly onto her shoulder, still seeming oddly sped up even in her movements, leading the way out of the cemetery and back to the house they grew up in. It was a short walk past darkened windows and unusually deserted streets. The taller girl thought that she saw occasional movement in alleyways but couldn’t be sure. The street was deserted and Adora noticed that all of the other homes had collapsed in on themselves.

Finally she looked up at Shadow Weaver’s house, their’s now she guessed. It had always been foreboding and a little ramshackle, their foster mother not caring about anything, not the children in her care or the state of their home, except herself. She realised that this would be THE house in town. The haunted one, the one the children ran from and they would have a reason to; more than one it seemed.

“Come on idiot,” Catra pulled her up the stairs to the front door.

“Your idiot!”

“You sure are,” for the first time in their new life they kissed and Adora saw stars.

“Now come on, I have someone waiting for dinner.” The clawed hand reached out and pushed open the door, a delicious coppery smell filling the air as she did, and they disappeared inside.

**Author's Note:**

> Adora’s zombie state is inspired by the movie ‘Wasting Away’ - it’s cute go watch it!


End file.
